by Simon Brett
Carole was intrigued by the relationship between the two men. They clearly knew each other well, yet there didn’t seem to be much affection between them. And Curt Holderness appeared to hold the balance of power. She wondered what favours they had done each other in the past.
Saddled with buying the drinks, Kelvin Southwest all of a sudden became elaborately chivalrous and asked if he could treat ‘the lovely ladies’ as well. To Carole’s surprise, Jude responded quite sharply that they were fine, ‘thank you very much’.
When they eventually got their Chilean Chardonnays and were walking back to the function room, Carole asked her neighbour why she had bitten off Kelvin Southwest’s head. “It’s unlike you, Jude.”
“Yes. There’s just something I find rather creepy about him.”
“I agree. All that smarm about ‘lovely ladies’.”
“And from someone who really loathes women.”
“What?”
“Kelvin Southwest is not attracted to women.”
“But all his going on about ‘lovely ladies’…”
“It’s a front. Women don’t turn him on sexually.”
“How do you know, Jude?”
“I just know.”
Carole didn’t argue. She knew there were certain areas of life in which Jude’s instincts were much more accurate than her own. So maybe the fact that Kelvin Southwest appeared to fancy her more than he fancied Jude wasn’t such great news after all. “Then what do you think does turn him on sexually?”
“I don’t know,” replied Jude. And she shuddered.
∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧
Twenty-Nine
“Now you’ve all heard of scuba diving but the next question is: what do the letters ‘S – C – U – B – A’ stand for?”
At the tables around Reginald Flowers and his microphone, discussions erupted and a few confident contenders started writing down answers. Jude puffed out her cheeks in an expression of ignorance and looked around at her teammates. “Sea Coast…Underwater…Breath Aid…?” she hazarded.
“Not bad,” said the Captain of Smalting Golf Club. “But not right, I’m afraid. In fact, the correct answer is: ‘Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus’.”
“How do you know that?” asked Jude. “Have you ever done it?”
“Oh yes,” he assured her. “I used to do a lot of other sports before golf took over my life. I don’t know if I happened to mention it, but I am currently Captain of Smalting Golf Club.”
“Yes, you did mention it,” said Carole testily. “Quite a few times.”
The golf captain and his wife looked at her open-mouthed, as Carole, who had been appointed team scribe, wrote the answer down. There were still a distressing number of blanks on the form. She had hoped, with her crossword expertise, to be doing rather better on the quiz. But then she hadn’t really been anticipating questions on the names of the Arsenal team who won the 1994 European Cup Winners’ Cup. And German aircraft of the Second World War could hardly be described as her specialist subject. Nor indeed could the hits of Beyonce.
Though slightly soured by the fact that she knew so few answers, Carole was grudgingly impressed by the range of questions. It was fair enough, she supposed, that the subject matter covered should be broad. That ensured that no one – including, unfortunately, her – had any special advantage.
She wondered whether Reginald Flowers had taken his list from a book or the internet, or whether he’d done his own research. From her assessment of the man’s character, she thought the latter was probably the answer.
Reginald coughed again into his microphone. “Right, you’ve all had enough time on that one. Let’s move on. The next question is a literary one.” There was groaning from some of the tables, which encouraged Carole. She reckoned here was a subject on which she was in with a chance. “What is the name of the terrible school run by Wackford Squeers in Charles Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby?”
As she smugly wrote down the answer, Carole was cheered by the sound of more groans. Through which sounded a raucous shout from Curt Holderness. “Was it maybe Edgington Manor School? I heard some well dodgy things went on there.”
Few of the quiz contestants took any notice of what he’d said. It was lost in the general badinage of disappointment about having another literary question. But the effect of the security officer’s words on the quizmaster was astonishing. Reginald Flowers’s face went suddenly red and he reached up to loosen his naval-looking tie. For a moment he looked as if he was about to throw up. Dora Pinchbeck stared at him with a mixture of alarm and compassion. When Reginald next spoke there was a distinct wobble in his husky voice.
“Right, have you all got that one? The school in Nicholas Nickleby? And we’ll move on. Next question: what is the name of the guitarist brother of the Kinks’ main songwriter, who co-wrote and took the vocal on Death of a Clown?”
Carole raised her eyes to heaven. How could any normal human being be expected to answer that?
Jude nudged her and whispered, “Dave Davies.” Carole wrote it down. But then she’d never thought of Jude as being quite a normal person.
♦
They hadn’t won. In fact, when the answers were read out, the combined intellects of Carole, Jude, the Captain of Smalting Golf Club and his silent wife had only managed to beat one other table. Carole left the Crown and Anchor feeling a little disgruntled. Of course, the quiz had been just for fun. It didn’t matter who won. But she had rather prided herself on her general knowledge and was disappointed not to have done better. Though she hid it well, Carole Seddon did have a surprisingly competitive instinct.
She and Jude were in the car park on their way home when Carole suddenly remembered she’d left her cardigan in the function room. She went back to fetch it, annoyed at having forgotten it and equally annoyed at having brought it in the first place. Sometimes the instinctive caution in her own nature infuriated Carole. Nobody else had taken a cardigan. Everyone else had trusted the warmth of the June evening, without worries about the fact ‘that it might get a bit nippy later’. Sometimes just being Carole Seddon was an extraordinarily exhausting experience.
The lights were off in the function room, but enough illumination came from outside for her to see the way to her table and pick up the offending cardigan from the back of the chair. As she moved towards the main pub she was stopped by the sound of voices she recognized.
Between the function room and the bar ran a narrow corridor that led to the toilets. Carole shrank back into the shadows to listen. The two men, she reckoned, must have just been using the facilities, and fortunately the first words she heard from Kelvin Southwest were exactly the question she would have wished to put to Curt Holderness.
“What was all that about the school? You know, what you shouted out to old Reg?”
“You get a lot of useful information when you work for the police, Kel. Some of it information that people would rather never became public knowledge.”
“Are you saying you’ve got something on Reg Flowers?”
“You bet I have.”
“Something he’d pay for you to keep quiet about?”
“He’s already made one payment, yes. But now he’s not quite so forthcoming. So I think I need to have another chat with Mr Flowers rather soon. See if we can sort out some…more regular arrangement. I don’t think he’ll argue. Did you see how he reacted when I mentioned the name of the school?”
“Mm. I’d heard he was a teacher. That where he used to work?”
“Edgington Manor School, yes.”
“I haven’t heard of it. Is it local?”
“Oh no. Up in the Midlands. But someone I knew on the force worked up there before he was transferred to West Sussex. And I met the bloke at someone’s retirement do, and I told him I’d got this security officer job for the beach huts, and I was telling him about the set-up with the SBHA and what have you, and when by chance I mentioned the name of Reginald Flowers…well,
he pounced on it and gave me chapter and verse.”
“Yeah? So what had old Reg been up to?”
“Well, let’s just say he didn’t get to full retirement age at Edgington Manor School. In fact, not to put too fine a point on it, he left the place under something of a cloud.”
∨ Bones Under The Beach Hut ∧
Thirty
On the way back from the Crown and Anchor to their respective homes, Carole told Jude what she had just overheard.
“So you reckon Curt Holderness is blackmailing Reginald Flowers?”
“I can’t put any other interpretation on what he said.”
“But you didn’t hear exactly what had happened? Why he’d left the school under a cloud?”
“No, I didn’t,” said Carole, before adding darkly, “but I could make an educated guess. I think we should try to talk to Reginald as soon as possible. Are you free tomorrow morning?”
“Certainly am.”
♦
Carole had reckoned that Reginald Flowers would be an early bird on Smalting Beach. Goodness only knew where he lived, where he spent his nights, but The Bridge was clearly the centre of his daily life. So Carole had decided to get there at half-past seven on the Saturday and give Gulliver his morning walk on Smalting rather than Fethering Beach. Jude, whose body clock favoured a more leisurely getting-up routine, was silent and, by her usually sunny standards, almost grumpy.
Still, both women had the sense that their investigation might finally be getting somewhere. Curt Holderness’s admission the night before that he was blackmailing Reginald Flowers offered intriguing revelations.
But nothing, as it turned out, was going to be revealed that morning. The bar and padlocks on the front of The Bridge were locked in place, and there was no sign of the hut’s owner.
“Staying in bed with his bronchitis,” Jude suggested. “He did sound fairly ropey last night.”
“Yes,” Carole agreed glumly.
They took Gulliver for a long walk along Smalting Beach, as far as the headland that separated it from Fethering. But when they returned to the crescent of beach huts, there was still no sign of Reginald Flowers.
Disconsolately, they returned to the Renault, wondering who they knew who might have an address for the chairman of the SBHA.
As soon as she got back to High Tor, Carole checked her copy of The Hut Parade. There was a landline number for Reginald Flowers, but each time she tried it, the phone just rang and rang. Not even an answering machine message.
Carole Seddon took out her frustration by cleaning High Tor to within an inch of its life.
♦
Next door at Woodside Cottage, Jude was equally restless. She tried to read the manuscript of a friend’s book about the origins of acupuncture, but interesting though she found the subject, she found her mind kept slipping away from the text.
Till they contacted Reginald Flowers, there was nothing they could do on the Robin Cutter case.
It was early afternoon before she realized that there was still something she could try doing on the Mark Dennis case. She retrieved the phone number Gray Czesky had written down two days earlier, and keyed it into her mobile.
To her astonishment it was answered. By Mark Dennis.
He sounded subdued, but not adversarial. Jude didn’t try any subterfuge, no pretence that she was a member of the police force. She just said that she was a friend of Philly’s and she remembered meeting him with her. She said that she and her friend Carole would really like to meet up with him. Without demur, Mark suggested a rendezvous at six that evening in the Boatswain’s Arms in Littlehampton.
“How did he sound?” asked Carole when Jude came rushing round to High Tor with the news.
“A bit sort of tentative. Vague maybe.”
“But not frightened?” She was remembering Nuala Cullan’s description of the last time she saw her husband.
“No, I wouldn’t have said frightened.”
♦
Mark Dennis was not there when they got to the Boatswain’s Arms. It was a roughish pub, the opposite end of the spectrum from The Crab Inn at Smalting. Littlehampton was like that. Although undergoing selective gentrification by expensive new developments of flats near the sea and the trendy modernity of the East Beach café, parts of the town remained resolutely tacky. When Carole and Jude asked for Chilean Chardonnay at the counter, the Boatswain’s Arms barman only offered them ‘White Wine’. It was rather too sweet for either of their tastes. Lachrymose country and western music whined away in the background.
They sat down at a sticky round table and were aware of the scrutiny of the pub’s other, silent customers. The atmosphere wasn’t exactly hostile, but it wasn’t welcoming either. Carole and Jude realized at the same time that they were the only women there. The chalkboard ads for Sky Sports suggested the Boatswain’s Arms was a male haven, a place where lugubrious men dropped in after work to sink a silent pint or two, while they put off returning to their wives and other responsibilities.
Carole and Jude were both very excited at the prospect of meeting Mark Dennis. Finally, it seemed, at least one part of their investigation was making headway. Though neither of them could imagine that Mark himself had anything to do with the placing of Robin Cutter’s remains under Quiet Harbour, they were still convinced he had important information to give them.
But as the minutes after their six o’clock agreed meeting time passed, the two women started to worry that he wasn’t going to turn up. In her head Jude tried to analyse exactly how he had sounded on the phone. Not frightened, no, but certainly nervous. Maybe he’d agreed to their meeting on the spur of the moment, and then thought better of the idea as its reality approached. Jude wished she’d asked Gray Czesky for an address as well as a phone number for Mark. Though the painter might well not have known one.
It was nearly six-thirty when the two women exchanged looks. Both were thinking the same thing: it was time to give their proposed meeting up as a bad job. But at that moment Mark Dennis came in through the door.
Had she not been expecting him, had they just passed in the street, Jude would not have recognized the young man. When she’d last seen Mark Dennis, probably in the April, he had been slender and gym-toned. With his sharp features, outdoor tan and straw-coloured hair, he and Philly Rose had made a singularly attractive couple.
But in the intervening months Mark Dennis had put on a lot of weight. The sideways spread of his face had made his eyes, nose and chin look too close together. And the weight gain seemed to have taken him by surprise. He hadn’t yet adjusted his wardrobe to cope with it. The buttons down the front of his short-sleeved shirt strained against their buttonholes, and his thighs were very tight against his jeans.
His expression also was of someone taken by surprise, someone bewildered by what life had done to him. Recognizing Jude, he gazed rather blearily at the two women as she introduced him to Carole.
Asked what he’d like to drink, Mark Dennis opted for mineral water and Carole went to the bar to order it. She wondered for a moment whether the Boatswain’s Arms would stock something as girlie as mineral water, but fortunately they did.
When she rejoined them, Carole found Mark already deep in conversation with Jude, apparently with no inhibitions about discussing his missing months. “It was very odd. I was just out of it.”
“How do you mean ‘out of it’?” asked Jude.
“Not here. On another planet.” His voice still carried the vagueness that she had noticed on the phone.
“Take us back to the beginning of May,” she said. “When you left Philly.” He winced at the reminder. “Tell us what happened, that is, if you don’t mind?”
“No, I don’t mind. I’ve been trying to make sense of it myself for some time. It might help to talk about it.”
“Why haven’t you talked about it to Philly?” asked Carole, possibly in too sharp a tone.
But Mark Dennis was unfazed by her question. “I’ll come to that. I’
ll explain it. Well, the main thing is, back in May I was in a pretty strange state, when all that happened. Not behaving very rationally.” He looked at Jude, almost pleadingly. “I don’t know if Philly told you anything about our circumstances…”
“A bit. I gather you had money problems.”
“And how. Yes, we’d moved out of London and down to Smalting in January. And then everything was fine. I’d got quite a lot of savings from various bonuses and what have you, then we made a bit of profit from selling our two London places and buying Seashell Cottage. Anyway, I invested all we’d got in various directions. Do you understand derivatives?”
Both women shook their heads.
“Neither, as it turned out, did I. I thought I understood them, but some freak activities in the world markets meant…well, effectively I’d lost the lot. Our little seaside idyll was looking very shaky, very much under threat.”
“So why didn’t you talk to Philly about it?” asked Carole. “Why did you just walk out on her?”
Again he didn’t react to the aggression in her questions. “I didn’t mean to just walk out on her. I meant to…sort things out. In fact, I don’t know if you know, but there were other complications in my life. I’m still technically married.”
“We know that,” said Jude.
“Yes,” Carole added. “We have actually met Nuala.”
“Have you?” Mark Dennis grimaced. “Something I must do again soon at some point. Not an encounter I look forward to.”
“We gathered from Nuala,” said Jude, “that she was pressing you for money too.”
“Mm. We had this odd arrangement. I wanted to get divorced. The marriage had been over in everything but name for quite a long time. But Nuala wasn’t keen on the idea of divorce.”